This concise account of the notorious Native Police, a paramilitary strike force that operated against Queensland's indigenous people between 1859 and 1914, is long overdue. The majority of accounts published in the past have been made by uncritical commentators who have embellished, and to a considerable extent mythologized, this lethal weapon of colonial expansion. By analyzing the quintessential issues in depth, Jonathan Richards has thus made a valuable contribution to Queensland historiography, in particular, and British history, generally. This is made more evident by placing the Queensland unit within a broader global context, which clearly shows that it was part of a colonial pattern designed to divide and conquer indigenous people throughout the British Empire. Although it is no secret that a large body of documentation relating to the Native Police can be found in the Colonial and Home Secretary's files held at Queensland State Archives, a full appraisal was dependent on locating the documents widely scattered throughout the archival records, often in the most obscure locations. It is not surprising, then, that this publication is the result of fifteen years of dedicated research.
When Queensland achieved self-government and separated from New South Wales in 1859, Governor George Bowen decided to retain the Native Police corps that had been raised by the minor government official and adventurer Frederick Walker twelve years before. Recognizing the ability of this unit to pacify a rapidly expanding frontier, Bowen believed that some form of government control was preferable to the pastoralists and other European frontiersmen taking matters into their own hands. That the indigenous resistance was strong is unquestionable, but as Richards points out, until the Police Act was passed in late 1863, the legality of government-sanctioned violence through the Native Police was questionable. It is also pertinent that despite considerable criticism of the Native Police throughout its entire fifty-five-year history, only two parliamentary inquiries—in 1858 and 1861—were ever made into its activities. Neither of them resulted in any reform.
Nominally under the control of Queensland's commissioner of police, the corps was a distinct unit whose European officers had some measure of autonomy. It was never a particularly large force, with the number of aboriginal troopers fluctuating from a maximum of 250 in the 1860s to as low as 106 during the 1880s. The troopers were usually recruited from districts far removed from their field of operation to avoid kinship links and discourage both fraternization and desertion. Yet, as Richards reveals, desertion continued to plague the force from beginning to end, even though the risk of summary execution was high.
This was at least partly because the work was low paid and dangerous, discipline was extremely harsh, and the highest rank to which any aboriginal trooper could aspire was that of corporal. It was also a unique unit within the British Empire in that European officers never led from the front—they always walked or rode behind. The official reason was that the officers risked compromising the excellent tracking skills of the troopers; critics of the force, and there were a great many, believed that it saved the officer the embarrassment of asking directions. With disgruntled troopers, it was also a safer place to be during the excitement of a “dispersal,” the general euphemism for wholesale slaughter of aboriginal people.
Despite a very good discussion of the aboriginal troopers, one of the shortfalls of this work is its failure to adequately address the reasons why aboriginal men joined the Native Police. Rations, wages, and access to aboriginal women were certainly important, but there were many other complex factors that required further investigation. Conversely, Richards has dispelled the myth propounded by many popular writers, which credits the troopers with unrestrained violence. There were instances, for example, in which the troopers avoided firing on their foes or attempted to persuade their officers that they had killed large numbers of aborigines when in fact the casualties had been extremely light.
European officers have been well documented, including a potted biography of the individuals as an appendix. Given the degree of autonomy that many had on the distant frontier, their degree of quality varied widely. Some were capable: Frederick Urquhart rose from subinspector to become Queensland's commissioner of police in 1917. Few were humane, and some were little more than sadists. After repeated reprimands for excessive cruelty, Frederick Wheeler was finally charged in 1876 with kicking and flogging a ten-year-old aboriginal boy to death. Wealthy through inheritance, it was widely known that if Wheeler stood trial he had sufficient information regarding atrocities committed by fellow officers to threaten the very existence of the Native Police. He was accordingly granted bail and allowed to escape the colony. How many aboriginal people were killed by the Native Police will never be known with certainty. As Richards argues, however, the archival and historical records confirm that the force was responsible for the greatest number of aboriginal deaths in colonial Queensland.
Yet, for all its violence, Queensland's Native Police was anything but an anomaly. The use of indigenous paramilitary units was a common feature of European colonization, a divide-and-conquer strategy that was brought to perfection by British administrators throughout the empire. This, of course, begs the fundamental question as to whether these actions can be considered genocidal. According to Richards, under the narrow definition of the UN declaration, the Native Police and, by extension, the Queensland government were not guilty of genocide. It would nevertheless be very different if the definition was slightly broader, and as this study clearly shows, the activities of the Native Police stand today as a bloodied page in British imperial history.
